Very Scary Halloween Special

Long story short, we guarantee you that nothing's going to scare you this year. There will be no ENORMOUS HAUNTED EYEBALL to terrorize you around an island filled with tons of SECRET LOOT, and a GIANT SKULL! There will be approximately zero percent chance of you getting your trembling hands on a spooky costume FOR EVERY CLASS! And we certainly wouldn't DRAMATIZE THE BACKSTORY of this hypothetical scary update with a FEAR-CHOKED TERROR-COMIC!

On October 21, 2011, a blog post on the TF2 Official Website confirmed the 'Third Annual Scream Fortress Halloween' update to be released sometime during the following week.[1]

On October 21, 2011, Valve developer Jon Lippincott posted to the HLDS mailing list, stating that new Halloween content will be released "in the near future".[2] The e-mail confirmed the introduction of gift drops, which were a feature of previous Halloween events that dropped special items, such as the Haunted Halloween Gift, for players on the specific event map Mann Manor. Lippincott stated that gift drops will only occur on servers that have registered with Steam, and that abusing or attempting to cheat the drop system will result in the removal of the server's registration.

On October 27, 2011, a blog post on the TF2 Official Website announced the imminent arrival of the "Scream Fortress Very Scary Halloween Special" with a new comic titled "Bombinomicon", as well as some details of the halloween update such as "awesome costumes that you can pick up by collecting scattered gifts in the Halloween update". The comic hints that MONOCULUS will be the event's boss, similar to the Horseless Headless Horsemann.[3]

On October 27, 2011 Patch, Halloween 2011 content was added including a "haunted" version of Viaduct known as Eyeaduct, two halloween achievements and a cosmetic halloween themed item set for each class.[4]

On November 2, 2011 Patch, MONOCULUS was granted the ability to level up, increasing health and attack speed each time he is killed.

On November 7 at 12am UTC, the event and sale concluded and the Haunted Halloween Gift no longer dropped.